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Tom Jicha

Tom Jicha grew up in New York City and worked with John Pricci at the short-lived revival of the New York Daily Mirror. Tom moved to Miami in 1972 for a position in the sports department at the now defunct Miami News.

Tom became the TV critic in 1980 and moved to the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1988. All the while he has kept his hand in sports, including horse racing. He has covered two Super Bowls, a World Series and the Breeders’ Cup at Gulfstream Park.

He's been the Sun Sentinel’s horse racing writer since 2007 as a staff member, and continues to this day as a free-lancer.

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Thursday, June 29, 2017

Summit went to the top of racing quickly and has stayed there

Summer used to be truly the racing doldrums in South Florida. The conventional thinking was it was too hot to risk really outstanding horses. Calder's pre-Churchill Downs management team refused to accept this and created the Summit of Speed to lure top sprinters south in July. The series of rich races, which will be renewed at Gulfstream on Saturday, took off immediately and is now an established high spot in the lull month between the end of the Triple Crown and the openings of Saratoga and Del Mar.

Gulfstream has done such a splendid job elevating the status of South Florida summer racing it is easy to forget the foundation was laid by Calder's pre-Churchill Downs management team.

One of the cornerstones was the Summit of Speed, which will be renewed Saturday in a stakes laden Gulfstream card highlighted by a couple of Grade 2's and a Grade 3.

Prior to the inaugural Summit in 2000, the notion of a graded stakes during the blistering South Florida heat was a pipe dream. This gnawed at then promotion and marketing director Mike Cronin, a rare race track executive, who passionately loves racing more as a sport than a business.

Creation of the Summit was his of way of reminding horsemen, "Hey, guys, we're still here."

Cronin relied on a cardinal rule of business, find a void and fill it. â€śI knew sprints were an under-utilized category and there was a soft spot on the calendar for major events between the end of the Triple Crown and the openings of Saratoga and Del Mar.â€ť

He asked his forward thinking boss, Calder president Ken Dunn, to approve $1 million in purses for the centerpiece events, the Smile Sprint and Princess Rooney, each endowed with $500,000 purses. Confident in Cronin, Dunn told him to go for it.

"We both felt we had to put on a big show to get noticed,â€ť Cronin said.

Half-million dollar purses were unheard of windfalls for sprints anywhere during the summer. In fact, the Smile and Princess Rooney will each go for half the original amounts this weekend, although Gulfstream will disperse $1 million including the undercard stakes.

They were lucky to have the late Bobby Umphrey Jr. as racing secretary. "Bobby had worked on the West Coast for many years," Cronin said. "He still had a lot of connections out there, so every year he and I went out there recruiting. West Coast guys are used to shipping East for big races, so they were susceptible. By the second or third year, when they saw us coming around the barns, they would go, 'Here come the Summit guys.'"

It didn't hurt that Dunn also signed off on underwriting the cost of a plane to bring the Westerners back East and treated them royally when they arrived.

Getting a series as ambitious as the Summit off the ground can be daunting and time consuming. In this case, it was a success from the get-go, Cronin said. "It hit pretty quickly, We were over the hump after the first year."

The racing world noticed when Caller One took the initial Carry Back then went on to win the Golden Shaheen in Dubai twice. So much for the fear that Floridaâ€™s summer heat would debilitate a horse. In 2002 and 2003, Orientate and Cajun Beat competed in the Summit prior to winning Breedersâ€™ Cup Sprint races. Crack sprinters have been coming south ever since.

In 2005, Lost in the Fog, one of the finest sprinters of the millennium, shipped in from the West Coast to capture the Carry Back.

The Breedersâ€™ Cup eventually recognized what was happening. The Smile and Princess Rooney are now â€świn-and-youâ€™re-inâ€ť events. There was a one-year break in continuity in 2014 at the height of the Calder-Gulfstream dates battle but once that was settled, Gulfstream picked up the baton and kept the series going.

The only discordant note during the early stages of the Summit, Cronin said, was local horsemen got their noses out of joint that out-of-towners were coming to town and scooping up big money they felt should be going to them.

This problem was solved the right way. Racing is a meritocracy. The Calder guys were urged to point their own best stock at the Summit. By 2010-11, this problem went away when locals won seven of the eight biggest stakes. Theyâ€™ve been holding their own ever since.

This trend could continue Saturday. Dearest will take a ton of beating in the Princess Rooney. She won the Azalea on last yearâ€™s Summit card then encored in the Sugar Swirl during the winter meet. The latter was sandwiched by close defeats in the Prioress at Saratoga and Inside Information this past winter.

Distinta, who won the Inside Information, is also in the field but the race shape works in Dearestâ€™s favor. She can consistently fire sub-45 second first quarters, something none of the others have demonstrated an ability to match. She should be long gone.

Three Rules, hero of last summerâ€™s Sire Stakes, looks like a good bet to get back in the win column in the Carry Back. He won his first five career starts at Gulfstream but hasnâ€™t won in his last five, all in top grade company. His only out-of-the-money finishes during this stretch were in the Breedersâ€™ Cup Juvenile and Kentucky Derby and he wasnâ€™t disgraced in either.

His connections nominated him for the Carry Back for 3-year-olds as well as the open Smile and opted to stay against his own age to get him back on the winning track.

Awesome Banner, another Gulfstream development, is likely to be heavily supported in the Smile but he doesnâ€™t appear to be the horse he used to be. He had five wins and three seconds in 11 starts last year but has only a pair of thirds in four 2017 starts.

An intriguing alternative is Mid-Atlantic shipper Imperial Hint, who has three consecutive triple-digit Beyers, which is three more than his rivals combined.

Cronin, whose heart was broken by the demise of Calder, now works for the HBPA in Minnesota but still follows the Summit. He can be proud of what he started.

Another mockery

Flavien Pratt is the latest jockey to make a mockery of riding rules. Pratt, in a tight race for the Santa Anita riding title, was hit with a three-day suspension for careless riding in the Summertime Oaks on June 16.

He should have served the days this weekend but to keep his hopes alive to win the championship, he appealed to the California Horse Racing Board. The CHRB turned his plea aside, so he went to court and got a stay. This is just what society needs, jockeys tying up the courts.

Donâ€™t be surprised if he drops the appeal after this weekend so he is all set to ride at Del Mar, which opens July 19. This is standard operating procedure for jockeys.

The only way to stop these sham appeals is to come down hard on riders after the process plays out. If you get a traffic ticket and take it to court, the fine can be tripled or quadrupled. This should also be the case for frivolous rider appeals.

When Pratt drops his appeal, the CHRB should raise the suspension to 10 to 15 days. Itâ€™s the only way this nonsense will be stopped.

Thursday, June 22, 2017

They’re back! Cries for longer Triple Crown gaps arise again

The conventional thinking was that American Pharoah's Triple Crown would silence those who argue for longer gaps between the three races. Not so. Some respected voices in the sport are already resuscitating their contentions that three races in five weeks is not reflective of contemporary racing. All it would take is an approval from NYRA, which moved the Met Mile off Memorial Day, to set the change into motion.

Well, that didn't take long. Only two years after American Pharoah swept the Triple Crown, cries are going out that the three races in five weeks (American Pharoah won four in eight weeks) is too taxing and should be extended over a longer period of time.

Randy Moss, a thoughtful observer of racing, has suggested the Kentucky Derby retain its traditional spot on the first Saturday in May with the Preakness three weeks later on Memorial Day weekend and the Belmont more than a month down the road on the Fourth of July,

Ray Paulick and Scott Jagow jumped into the fray on their "Friday Show" on the The Paulick Report. With respected voices such as this chiming in, the debate is back in play.

Paulick came down on Moss' side, making the point that horses don't run back in two weeks anymore. Jagow took the contra, saying a change would make enablers of trainers and others who have created this situation, with permissive medication a major contributing factor. Every horse in the Belmont, ostensibly the finest of their generation, was treated with Lasix, whose side effects include dehydration, necessitating longer gaps between races.

"Not every horse is a bleeder," Jagow said.

However, every horsemen is looking for an edge or at least not giving one to competitors, which undermines the disingenuous claim that Lasix is not a performance enhancer.

It's interesting that the debate is being revived so quickly post-American Pharoah. Thankfully, nothing is likely to change in the foreseeable future. Todd Pletcher, a student of racing history, conceded as much during an NTRA conference call preceding the second jewel of the Triple Crown.

"Had American Pharoah not won the Triple Crown, I think there's probably a movement that could have potentially led to maybe a little bit of the changing of the spacing but I think that since that happened, it's likely to stay the way it is."

Pletcher, whose MO is to run back in two weeks in the Preakness only when he has the Derby winner, said he is fine with the status quo. "In addition to American Pharoah winning (the Triple Crown), there have been quite a few horses that have come awfully close in the past 15 years or so. So I think it's proven that it's doable. Part of what makes it so special is it is so hard to do."

Exactly.

The timetable suggested by Moss is nothing new. It was often the model for a new configuration pre-American Pharoah and is as good as any if there is to be a change--which there should not be. It's as short-sighted as making tests easier so that more currently failing kids can pass.

Once you start tinkering with the Triple Crown, there could be no end. D. Wayne Lukas has long advocated that the distances be revised to a nine-furlong Kentucky Derby, leaving the Preakness as is at a mile and three-sixteenths and a mile and a quarter Belmont Stakes. God forbid, but a reasonable argument for it could be mounted once the series is opened to change.

Altering the sequence could be done a lot easier than many people think, which is why there should be at least some cause for concern. It's actually almost totally in the hands of NYRA.

There is no such thing as a Triple Crown organization. The Derby, Preakness and Belmont have a shared nomination process but that's about it.

Christmas will be moved off Dec. 25 before Churchill gets off the first Saturday in May but Pimlico woould leap at the opportunity to schedule the Preakness more than two weeks later. In addition to getting more Derby horses, a bigger break would enable Pimlico to attract a greater number of stars from the Derby undercard stakes.

However, the Preakness is locked in to its current placement as long as the Belmont remains five weeks after the Derby.

All it would take is for NYRA to agree to run the Belmont three or four weeks or more after a rescheduled Preakness and the deed would be done. So while a change in the near future is unlikely, it is not outside the realm of possibility especially if the drumbeats for it continue to grow.

There was a time when it was unthinkable that the Met Mile would be shifted away from Memorial Day but the same people who could alter the Triple Crown landscape did that and are congratulating themselves that it was a splendid idea.

Monmouth warns horsemen

Monmouth and its horsemen are again embroiled in a controversy that sprung up last year.

The New Jersey track, which is suffering from a severe shortage of horses to fill even three-day-a-week cards, told its horsemen that any horses shipped to Suffolk Downs for its six days of racing this summer will not be allowed back into the Monmouth stable area.

Suffolk will offer almost double Monmouth's average daily purse distribution of $280,000 when it conducts racing on July 8-9, Aug. 5-6 and Sept. 2-3, all days when Monmouth also will be racing.
When this conflict arose a year ago, about 65 Monmouth horses shipped to a race at Suffolk. Horsemen were hit with a $1,000 per horse fee to return to Monmouth, which wound up being paid by an anonymous donor, with the stipulation it go to a retired horses fund.

This year, Monmouth says such horses will not be allowed back period.

It's a draconian stance but one with which Monmouth, which is fighting for survival, feels justified. I can't disagree.

Change is good

Another development that slipped through the media cracks without much comment during Triple Crown season was the announcement that the Breedersâ€™ Cup Turf Sprint will revert to five furlongs this fall.

It isnâ€™t so much that the race will be a true sprint on a flat surface. Itâ€™s that it will not be run on Santa Anitaâ€™s one-of-a-kind downhill course. This is one of my favorite races but it is terribly unfair as a championship event to those not familiar with the layout; i.e., non-California based horses.

The Turf Sprint has been run six times at Santa Anita and it has gone to SoCal horses five times. This November, horses from all over will at least have a level (no pun intended) playing field.

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Gun Runner romp reinforces greatness of Arrogate

Gun Runner re-establshed himself as the best dirt horse other than Arrogate with his business-like domination of the Stephen Foster. It only re-emphasized the gap between Arrogate and the rest of the planet.

Gun Runner re-established himself as the best dirt horse in the world not named Arrogate Saturday night in the Stephen Foster, demolishing as solid a group of two-turn older horses as could be assembled.

In so doing, he underlined that there is Arrogate and there is everyone else. Since memories tend to be short and overtaken by what-have-you-done-for-me lately comparisons, let's briefly revisit Arrogate's last four starts. He crushed a solid Travers field by more than 13 lengths, with Gun Runner 15 lengths in arrears.

Next he spotted California Chrome, the best horse of his generation, three lengths in the stretch of the Breeders' Cup Classic and ran him down as if he was a workout prompter.

Then he turned the Pegasus, the world's richest race, into a $7 million paid workout, ending the career of California Chrome on an unfortunate down note.

Finally, in what might be one of the most remarkable efforts in history, he broke behind his field in the Dubai World Cup, seemingly losing all chance--Bob Baffert said he couldn't bear to watch after that--then passed them all like they were running in desert sand. The final rival he put away was Gun Runner, who had five on the rest of the field.

Gun Runner had won his previous two starts--the Grade 1 Clark and Grade 3 Razorback--by more than eight lengths. He returned home to win another Grade 1 Saturday by seven lengths. That's how good Arrogate is. He has relegated Gun Runner to the category of Sham and Alydar, superior race horses who had the misfortune to come along in the wrong year.

Along with the majority of the Foster's $500,000 purse, Gun Runner earned a win-and-you're-in rematch with Arrogate in the Breeders' Cup Classic. This is like being rewarded with a shot to challenge the Golden State Warriors.

Arrogate, who has been training like, well Arrogate, is on schedule to make his return to the races on July 22 in the San Diego at Del Mar. It's something for racing fans to look forward to but I wouldn't want to be the racing secretary assigned to line up a field to run against him.

Baffert might have to drag a couple of his lesser stars out of the barn to make the race go. This would be one time I wouldn't think of betting the longer-priced Baffert.

NYRA's pants on fire

Saturday's decision by NYRA to cancel racing after the third race was a disgrace and its explanation an insult to the fans, who went to the time and expense to come out to Belmont and simulcast sites.

The press release read: "Following unexpectedly heavy rain in the New York City metro area, the New York Racing Association Inc. was forced to cancel the final six races at Belmont Park following the third race on Saturday, June 17 to ensure the safety of all participants."

What a crock! Racing is conducted in worse conditions all the time. There are torrential storms in Florida more days than not this time of year, which make Saturday's rain at Belmont look a spritz, and the show goes on.

Often in such instances, the jockeys play a role in decisions such as this. Johnny Velazquez, who is widely respected by management and his peers, did have an eventful trip aboard Clipthecouponannie in the Dancin' Renee, the final race to be run. But there was no mention on Saturday or since of the riders influencing the cancellation.

It would be understandable that they would not want to be attached. How heavy was the rain? About an hour after NYRA canceled the races, the Mets began and completed a nine inning game without delay at Citi Field approximately 10 miles away. Monmouth, also in the New York City metro area, was hit by essentially the same conditions and ran a complete card.

Here's what really happened: Five of the remaining six races were scheduled for the turf. Before the cancellation was announced, they had all been taken off the grass.

This would have entailed the usual array of massive scratches, probably creating several three- and four-horse fields. NYRA couldn't have that because this meant far fewer Pick 6 combinations and a greater likelihood that the bet would be hit and there was a $194,809 carryover. By cancelling, the carryover was protected for Sunday.

When NYRA shamelessly lies to its fans, how can its integrity be trusted on any matters?
Gulfstream saves the day.

Thankfully, the mandatory jackpot distribution of Gulfstream's Rainbow Six, which soared to more than $5 milllion, saved the day on what was a blah afternoon with NYRA bugging out and Churchill racing its stakes heavy Foster card at night.

I didn't hit it, of course--they don't pay conso's on four of six--but at 20 cents a shot, I had to get involved, especially with nothing else going on. I got four races worth of thrills for a less than $20 ticket.

The dream ended when 19-1 Fifth Avenue Flash won leg five. Just as well. I might have run out into traffic if I was still alive when my lone single, Enterprising, put up no effort in the final leg.

The scheduling of the mandatory payout was another example of the forward thinking of Gulfstream management. It wasn't the end of the meeting or the state's fiscal year. But Tim Ritvo and company saw the opening with Churchill racing at night and the likelihood of a weak Belmont card with only a New York-bred filly stakes.
Gulfstream got lucky when Belmont canceled. What's that saying about it's better to be lucky than good. Gulfstream was both.

I was neither but I got the consolation of a couple of hours of dreams staying alive.

Translation, please

Hereâ€™s an example of how, thanks to lawyers, everything costs more than it need to and common sense has no place in the legal system.

Frank Pallone, a congressman from New Jersey, has unveiled a bill that would overturn the prohibition against sports gambling and give states the right to determine whether they want sports gambling within their borders.

Does anyone not know what a bet is? Nevertheless, this is how Pallone had to word his proposed legislation to (hopefully) make it lawyer-proof.

â€śThe staking or risking any person of something of value, including virtual currency and actual or virtual items that can be sold or otherwise exchanged for cash at the gaming facility or elsewhere, upon the outcome of a contest of others, a sporting event, a game subject to change, or a game in which the outcomes reflect the relative knowledge and skill of the participants, upon an agreement or understanding that the person or another person will receive something of value in the event of a certain outcome.â€ť